Reader’s Note: God help me, but I went longer on this post than the normal 200 or so words, just to get some thoughts down. Feel free to skip or skim.
I’d never attended an International Communication Association research conference before, but this year’s Seattle hometown location for me pretty much demanded I go. So did the theme of “Communication and ‘The Good Life’” of online communication around the world, given my research focus of online forms of participatory journalism.
My learning began on a somber note. A study co-authored by Clifford Nass, a Stanford experimental psychologist whose work I often cite in my own, was scheduled for presentation. I looked forward to possibly meeting him for the first time (read: I got a mad intellectual crush on him). Then he died of a heart attack at age 55 while on vacation in late winter. His death reminded me that we need to choose well what we focus our time on because life really can be short. In my case, that’s continuing to try to figure out a measurement model for the otherwise fuzzy concept of “journalism-as-a-conversation” and how best to teach it and apply it to industry practices.
Among the better ones was a panel that explored relationship maintenance on Facebook. I’m interested in Facebook and other social networks because they’re highly effective tools for literally making conversational journalism happen, particularly as vehicles for crowdsourcing the news. How media professionals relate and engage with audiences on FB, then, is crucial. As the research on this panel suggested, FB relationships are pretty complex below the surface.
One study, for instance, showed many teens wish they didn’t have to accept their parents’ friend requests but feel obliged to (natch). When teens do accept, they prefer to initiate any subsequent communication, especially around photo-sharing and online games. Yet another study sought to refine/validate a measurement model for how people maintain relationships on FB and identified 4 key factors: supportive communication, shared interests, passive browsing and social-information sharing. Still another study confirmed what similar other ones found: FB is great for fostering Puttnam’s (2000) “bridging social capital” by letting diverse groups easily connect with each other socially. But FB’s not so great at creating “bonding social capital,” the kind of communication that truly deepens intra-group relationships.
How people engage in any social stream remains an important but still newish area of academic research. One of the strongest panels I attended looked at how PR professionals engage with various publics. The problem in PR as well as journalism (and marketing and advertising) is the murkiness of the term “engagement,” something I’ve struggled with in trying to define exactly what we mean by “journalism-as-a-conversation,” a form of engagement. A million different definitions, not much clarity and a general over-use of the term as a buzzword. One scholar, Dr. Maureen Taylor, has taken on the task of explicating “engagement” in PR contexts, much as I’ve done with “conversation” in journalistic contexts. Key, she said, is to explore the definition not just from an organization’s/client’s perspective but from the public’s perspective. Amen to that.
Finally, we all know the Web dramatically changed how we define and practice news. But what about the scientific theories we rely on to explain journalistic processes? I think some of the big ones in our field, such as Gatekeeping and Agenda Setting, don’t work so well because they generally assume all power rests with Big Media, who conduct a top-down monologue (not a conversation) with passive audiences. But some new theorizing is coming to the fore that acknowledges the importance of audiences as creators and/or recipients of information in the digital age, as one panel devoted to the topic showed.
For instance, Dr. Oscar Westlund and Dr. Seth Lewis argue researchers ought to be studying four key aspects of media work: actors (creators of content, including audiences at times), actants (technical means of production, such as content management systems), activities (work product, such as news stories) and audiences (recipients of information).
Dr. Chris Peters and Dr. Tamara Witschge, meanwhile, suggest re-thinking the democratic role of the news media. We’ve always understood the importance of media outlets in dispensing information to citizens in order to self-govern, or what we might call democracy through the media. But media outlets increasingly are becoming spaces themselves for democratic self-governance thanks to Web interactivity and audience participation, or democracy in the media, and that requires a whole new way of thinking about news. That is worth celebrating.
